swombat.com

daily articles for founders

Daniel is the cofounder and MD of GrantTree, previously CTO/cofounder of Woobius and Vocalix, a full-time entrepreneur since 2007, and founder of swombat.com. I previously worked at Accenture and studied Physics at the University of Oxford.

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Swombat.com started off as an individual effort, but it's now becoming the work of a team (to be announced).

Together, on swombat.com, we summarise and comment on the best articles for founders each day, as well as occasionally post our own thoughts and advice, so you can read the most useful articles while focusing on building your own startup.

"Long sales letter" landing pages, such as this one, are often used in the Direct Marketing/MLM industry, because, well, they work rather well. In this article, Paras Chopra interviews copywriter Jeremy Reeves about how to put together a long form salesletter, why it works, and so on.

Question: Do you think “sophisticated” web designers lose a lot because they are not ready to embrace techniques employed by long sales letter pages?

Absolutely. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that if they started testing long-form salesletters… they’d very soon be able to buy themselves a new house.

While the long-form salesletter format has certainly proven its worth in some industries, one would do well to apply a thick layer of context to this advice. In some cases (for example, a site targeted at geeks, a long salesletter would be simply disastrous, because it conveys a certain product image that Github's market has a strong dislike for.

So, it really depends who you're selling to, and, as Paras himself would probably advise (update: he has just done so here), the solution to this is not to decide in theory which one works, but to do some testing and figure out which one converts best for your product and your market.

Regardless, here's one of several gems in the article:

Question: What are your favorite copywriting tips and techniques?

The best technique you can ever use in copy is simply understanding the dominant emotions going on inside your prospects mind at the exact moment he/she is reading your copy. If you can understand that… it paves the way for every single word on the page and the copy flows like water.